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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037·

One thing I never see pushback about: Northern Virginia has the highest density of data centers in the United States. Google tells me there are over 600 data centers in Virginia (that is nuts!). This build-out has been happening for more than 25 years. Until very recently, I have not heard any pushback from people in that area. What am I missing?

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> What am I missing?

nation states trying to slow progress. I was pretty perplexed as well, now we're concerned about data centers? They're everywhere already.

Oh wait, it's a FUD campaign sewn by competing nations using social media so they can, hopefully, catch up. That makes a lot more sense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

Of course that's exactly what a US propaganda mill would say

Just as complicit in obfuscation of reality through quantity of time spent in a topic: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Yeah man, I'm sure the largest industrial mfg country in the world is desperate to buy time to outbuild the decaying husk of a mfg country that can't even build the transformers needed to power these data centers.

Better question, why don't they just build them in N. Virginia then?

I assume that data center builders can get cheaper land and/or lower taxes and/or easier regulations elsewhere. Also, the US is gigantic, so you want to have data centers geographically dispersed to reduce ping time for customers.

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